Re: Wind Farms.

see all above??

Re: Wind Farms.

Well, I've had another look through and cannot find anything explaining why tidal forces are not more widely used in this country to generate electricity.

If you've seen something, could you please tell me the post number?

Re: Wind Farms.

http://www.irishnews.com/business/20...n-2018-411706/

This one has been in the pipeline for as long as I've lived here -12 years at least

Re: Wind Farms.

Someone has their head screwed on!

Re: Wind Farms.

Surely anything tidal related is going to have a short shelf life and/or require constant maintenance. Just go look at a cruise ship. Rust spots everywhere which the crew are constantly treating and battling.

Anything plonked in the sea is going to corrode very quickly.

Re: Wind Farms.

Agreed.

Same for domestic solutions such as solar power, but unsurprisingly no solar power company is interested in setting up battery storage in your house. All they want is the feed-in-tariffs for themselves and to leave you with the night-time period when there's bugger all sunshine.

Governments and foreign moguls earn vast fortunes by keeping us all locked into expensive fossil fuels. There's no incentive for them to give up that lucrative position.

That is why the cost of buying your own solar panels has been made ultra prohibitive and why they passed laws to prevent the ordinary Joe Bloggs building and using his own solar panels.

The same will shortly be true of ground source heating which will hit the country properly in the next few years. Mass installation of heat pumps is going to happen and companies are going to sell your home heating as a service. i.e. They will install the heat pumps and equipment for free, drill into the ground for free but then you the customer will pay regular monthly heating bills as a service. It's coming trust me.

Every household is capable of, and should be, off the grid. There's no reason why we should all be able to use solar panels, wind turbines and other renewable sources to provide our own energy relatively freely. But the government makes that massively expensive to achieve in order to keep us hooked into the grid.

Battery storage IS absolutely key to it all as Besoeker says. We need gel battery systems or Lithium storage banks in our homes so that we can capture the sun's energy during the day whilst we are all at work and use it during the evening.
We live in pretty much a totalitarian regime though presenting itself as a democracy. About time the people stood up and revolted.

Re: Wind Farms.

I'd say that depends upon the material.

Re: Wind Farms.

I think Realist makes some excellent points for all manner of nature provided energy, whether it be by the wind, sun or sea. It's virtually free energy with just the cost of initial building, installation and maintenance to be accounted for.

In the village where I live, at the time of building, we had the largest coal fired power station in Europe. There have since appeared other coal fired stations such as Ferrybridge, Eggborough and Drax. They are sitting on the largest seams of coal in the British Isles. In fact, those seams of coal stretch across the North Sea to Germany.
It was once suggested that our miners were contributing to the war effort by nicking Hitlers Coal....

However, is it jobs you want to create by running coal fired stations? Miners, Transport, Engineers, all pushing up the cost of electricity. Or cheap virtually maintenance free power generation? Add to this the amount of land required to store coal supplies to the station, the amount of land required to store the ash produced, and the damage to the environment caused by the extraction of thousands of gallons of river water on a daily basis to cool the generation process. Not to mention the endless stream of Lorries, Barges and goods trains to feed the beast.

Since the station closed in the nineties the whole area has been turned into a massive nature reserve, even the threat of building a Gas Powered Station (which I agree with) would take up a fraction of the land and provide the least disturbance, and only requiring a handful of maintenance engineers. The gas would enter by pipes underground and would not produce burnt material needing to be stored and disposed of. Although natural gas will not last forever, so would eventually have to be imported and paid for.

Quite ironic really that the massive coal burning, energy producing, nature destroying leviathan of the past should leave a legacy to nature where it once stood.....

Re: Wind Farms.

Predictable for sure. But also variable over the cycle. You get nothing at slack water for example. And then there is the difference between spring tides and neap tides.

You need something to get the variability of the source to match the on-demand expectation. Usually, that is "spinning reserve" from fossils.

Re: Wind Farms.

A couple of points if I may.
Not every household is suitable for off-grid autonomy. Think of flats/apartment dwellings.

Storage technologies isn't just batteries. Hydro generation uses all that water behind the dam as storage. Ultracapacitors are a fairly recent development. Then there are energy storage flywheel systems. But so far, hydro is the only one at utility level. Itaipu, Three Gorges come to mind.